


In Bloom

by Aris



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, Anorexia, Anxiety, Body Dysphoria, Bulimic Tendencies, Eating Disorders, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Self-Hatred, Seriously one big trigger warning for eating disorders, Starvation, Trans Kozume Kenma, Trans Male Character, Unreliable Narrator, unsafe binding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-08-18 09:22:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8157169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aris/pseuds/Aris
Summary: Kenma has strangled every flower that has ever bloomed. He has reached inside of himself, pulled and pulled with desperate fingers until root tore from his shrinking organs, his throat bloody and sore and leaving behind a dull, satisfying emptiness. He has rendered his soil infertile, has denied it water and sun and food in the sick hope it'll wither away, turn to dust and float away in the harsh winter wind before he does.OR eating disorder recovery isn't a one time deal. kenma learns this the hard way





	1. Chapter 1

It doesn’t happen when he’s little.

He reads a lot of forum posts, scanning the internet late at night with volatile key words typed into blinking, expecting places. He finds these little secrets, typed out in winding paragraphs that pin point specific moments as children where all these tiny instances of unease and misunderstanding clash together to bring forth a cohesive moment of childhood confidence and innocent naivety. In these moments, they sometimes announce it to the people around them, happy or angry and oblivious of any consequences, while others tuck these truths deep into their chest where it is safest, where it can’t hurt them. But they have that truth, that little realisation.

Kenma wishes desperately that he could have, at least, had that. It’s an ugly bitterness he can almost taste on his tongue, because he knows it’s not always a good thing, knowing for so long, and that these people typing out their lives for others like them aren’t always accepted by the people around them. That life can be push after shove after kick, and that kids are cruel and adults’ crueller, believing forceful ignorance is somehow equivalent to tolerance. He knows this, has read this and buried this into his skin, but too often he stares at his bedroom ceiling and wonders what commodities he’d trade just so know a little earlier, what treatment he’d willing take to have just one more year of awareness.

As long back as he can remember, he had been shy and doubtful, easily swayed by the beliefs of others and realigning fluid cogs of his reality to match it to those around him, bringing himself quickly and quietly onto their wavelength. He was passive and obeying when his mother would call him indoors, tell him not to play with the boys, and to help her make dinner or read quietly. Kenma had always liked games, liked the easy logic and lull of theme tunes and worn out buttons clicking softly, but was rarely allowed to play them. His mother had worried her lip constantly, murmuring about newspapers and news reports on gaming addictions and lazy youth throwing away their lives for pseudo realities.

“… And it’s even girls, honey. Promise me you’ll be good girl, okay?” And his mother would stroke his silky hair (never ruffle, because that would make his hair messy, and only boys were allowed messy hair while Kenma would have to be fussed over and touched) “Girls like that won’t ever find a suitable husband.” Kenma, as always, would nod along drowsily with his mother’s words. She was probably right.

He remembers this conversation because the night before it, young and tired of not being allowed to do so much, he had snuck his GameBoy into his room under the band of his dress and played until his eyes were both dry and tearful. The guilt from it was fleeting, blanketed over by the knowledge no one would ever find out. Kenma had wondered if beating levels in games meant he couldn’t get married. He hadn’t understood at the time, but he didn’t think he would mind overly much.

Every other moment from his childhood seemed faded and irrelevant, if not horribly normal. He wore skirts, and he didn’t mind being a girl but he did mind the attention and ducked away from his hands stroking his hair and people touching his pretty little dresses and telling him how beautiful he would grow up to be, just like his mother. Kenma didn’t want to be a good girl or a pretty girl, didn’t want boys to whisper about him or aunts to fuss over his cardigans – he didn’t want the attention.

Despite that, for twelve years, everything had been fine.

###### 

His mother was waiting for something.

She would hmm happily in the kitchen, emphasizing in small bites of conversation that now was a special time in Kenma’s life, that he was growing up so fast. At these points, his father would look pointedly away towards his coffee or newspaper or just – anything else. He didn’t understand what she want hinting at, didn’t understand what the other women in his family meant when they crowded around and cooed about him blooming and blossoming, becoming a woman. They always used this flowery language.

He just nodded along, pliant as always, and felt the edges of his DS in his cardigan pocket. His mother would scold him if he played it.

A week after the family get together, a girl in his Languages class left the classroom in tears, ushered away by a teacher and blotches of blood staining the back of her school issued skirt. Unchaperoned, the boys in the laugh between hands and girls looks concerned, faces red and whispering one word over and over to each other. _Period._

Alone in his room, door closed and in the precious time where he’d usually be playing a game, he types this word into a web browsers and clicks through medicinal looking websites with daisies and flowers shoved into the corners of the page to appear inviting. There are bullet points on pain and blood, lines on uterus’s shedding their lining and bones shifting, muscles tightening and aching. There are hormonal balances – different for every girl, but _‘usually occurs in the early teens, ages 11-14 in most healthy girls,_ ”

Don’t worry, the page says, this is perfectly normal.

Then why is nausea creeping up his throat?

This is blossoming. Blooming. And it bubbles up something hysterical and darkly, thickly, horrible inside of Kenma, crushing at his lungs and squeezing his bones; this is his biology, cementing and pathing his identity for him, pushing him along further and further towards something he never agreed to, never thought too hard about. There’s panic, deep and wild, shaking at his hands and forcing his finger to scroll further down the page, to read more.

Healthy girls.

_Healthy._

This new found knowledge is heavy on him.

Kenma catches it more often now, in discussions. His mother is beaming and glowing still, squeezing his arms, catching the soft flesh there with her nails. She’s excited for him to be old enough, big enough, to grow up and be like her. Kenma doesn’t talk to many other girls, doesn’t talk to many other people in general (he never knows quite what they want from him when they speak to him, isn’t sure what their goal is with someone like him. There are no rules to follow, no restarts or pauses, so he stays silent. Silence is safe. People are not.) and so he doesn’t know if it’s normal for him to feel with every fiber this impending, haunting doom.

He doesnt like to think about gender too much, but it becomes more difficult with every passing day. He is hyper-aware of being sorted into the girls team in sports class, the way he is always put into groups with other girls, how everyone calls him ‘she’ and ‘her’. Before, he had never minded, never noticed, and now it’s there every step like an unrelenting itch. He feels different. Like it should strange or notable that people address him as a girl, that he is forced into skirts.

He likes skirts. They're free, unrestricted; but why does he _have_ to wear it?

The older girls, walking from home along the same path as he and his mother, would always be wearing skirts and dresses and never trousers. When he grew up, he would still have to wear that, too. It’s wasn’t, isn’t, fair that he has to dress like a girl, be a girl just because – just because he’s always been one. He doesn’t have to be a girl forever.

He can change.

He will.

###### 

Kuroo was the only one that never asked why Kenma stopped wearing skirts. Kuroo had always ruffled his hair, anyway, and invited him to do whatever he was into at that point of time regardless of the unimpressed noises Kenmas mother would make about him ruining his dress playing in the mud. He always told Kenma he was cool, and he liked hanging around him, even if that meant watching him play a game and walk the long way around the park to avoid the big crowds around the gate.

The older boy understood on a level Kenma himself didn’t understand. He stayed through the teasing, the nasty words and the shoves in the corridor, the snickering of groups of girls and the lewd suggestions of boys in sports classes. Kenma doesn’t quite know how to put his thankfulness into words, how to shape a sentence to express the depth of meaning and warmth that had kept each tiny piece of him from fracturing away. But he’s always been bad with words. Kuroo knows anyway, and it makes his chest ache a little under his binder that he has been lucky enough to find someone like him. Someone to trust, even if his mind can convince him otherwise sometimes.

It’s Sunday evening, and Kenma finished his remaining homework hours ago. He’s sprawled out over Kuroo’s lap as he tackles the same boss fight for the fifth time on his PSP. A text book is laid out on his back, a slight pressure that comes and goes as Kuroo leans down to read passages and draw out the information he needs to complete the draft he needs for an essay, due tomorrow. Kenma finds his attention oddly halved between the buttons beneath his fingers and the warm press of Kuroos thighs, digging into the soft flesh of his stomach.

He likes the closeness. Likes feeling small and light compared to Kuroo, who has always been taller and stronger, broad with muscle but lean. Kenma can pretend to be tiny when he’s next to Kuroo, can pretend the fat on his legs doesn’t make his stomach turn every time he sits, that the way they seem to double in size doesn't make his head hurt. He likes thinking his hands are slim when Kuroo holds them, but the reality is Kuroo has big hands and strong thighs and all his bulk is muscle. Kenma is just fat, Kenma is curves and Kenma is weak.

With Kuroo, he can pretend. It almost works sometimes, until he shifts just so and his binder digs into his fatty waist and suddenly he is horribly aware of every inch of his heavy, sickly body that is pressed into Kuroo. He wonders if Kuroo can still feel his legs with Kenma lying across them, he must have cut off circulation, and if the book balanced on his back is sinking into the soft flesh there, anchored by greed. 

Does Kuroo know how fat he is, under all the layers?

How _wrong_ he is?

“Kenma?” Kuroo breaks the silence, one hand coming to rest on the inside of Kenma’s knee.

“Hmm?” He replies, staring hard at his PSP.

“Are you okay?”

“Hmm…”

“Your game’s been paused for a while now.” He doesn’t reply this time, just pushes himself slowly off of Kuroo’s lap, giving the other time to grab his text book before it fell and creased a page. Kuroo’s free hand moves to loop around Kenma’s wrist in their new position, the setter leaning against the wall next to him, PSP still in his hands like he means to play it. It’s familiar. Comforting. He watches those long fingers tighten around his wrist as Kuroo slides closer, bumping their shoulders together and looking down at him through his unstyled hair.

“Hmm? What’s up, Kenma?”

“Nothing, I’m tired.” He huffs out, ducking his head down further to shrink away from that gaze. The one that doesn’t let him get away with anything.

“Did you eat breakfast?”

No.

“Yeah.”

“Lunch?”

“I ate that with you, stupid.” Kuroo brings his wrist up to his knee and presses a smile into the skin there. Kenma doesn’t blush, feeling the lunch that he _did_ eat with Kuroo lying like a brick in his body. Sushi. He could have probably thrown it up and got away with food poisoning, but Kuroo has been watching too close lately, had gone out of his way to take him to one of the few restaurants open on a Sunday to buy him lunch. He had always liked something about Nekoma, the cat team, eating fish. Kenma can catch him smiling about it to himself whenever they order it.

“And you’re going to eat dinner, yes?”

No.

“Yes.”

The smile on his wrist straightens out to a frown.

Kuroo doesn’t believe him.

###### 

It hits the ground with a resounding smack.

Silence, and then –

“What was that?”

“Kenma!”

The Setter in question stares down at his reddening hands, eyes floating towards the ball rolling away on the ground in his peripheral. His hands are trembling slightly, but too much, and he clasps them together to stop it being noticeable before the rest of Nekoma get too close. He breathes in deeply, as far as he can while recently exerted and wrapped up in his binder to its tightest hook, and looks up at his teams faces.

“I missed.”

They are disappointed, he knows. He is too.

“Sorry.”

“Kenma, are you okay? You don’t usually-”

“Let’s take five minutes,” Kuroo interrupts Lev, stretching his arms above his head in a show of fake nonchalance, meeting his gaze dead on. The team shift away from the court at their captains call, Taketora shooting a glance Kenma’s way as he retrieves the fallen ball from the court. Kuroo heads straight towards where Kenma still stands, stupidly still next to the net, and the younger boy finally gets into motion, drifting towards the side of the gym. He had hoped the rest of the team wouldn’t have picked up on it so soon.

“You promised me, Kenma,” Kuroo’s voice isn’t soft or forging, but it isn’t mean either. It’s firm. He has come to stand in front of Kenma, taller than him but somehow lesser with the creases of concern marking his expression and painted in the shadows of the hand he out stretches towards Kenma, longing to hold, comfort. But Kenma has nothing to say, can only drop his gaze and wish he had his phone, his PSP, anything to distract his hands right now.

He ends up staring at his monstrous thighs, impossibly large and barely covered by shorts.

“Come on, Kenma. You can’t play if you do this, and we can’t play without you. You’re our heart.”

“I don’t-“ He starts softly.

“Don’t, don’t. Just don’t, okay?” His denial, his lie, is cut short, “It’s obvious. I – I know, okay? You don’t look – well. I can’t deal with…” Kuroo runs his hand through his hair, looking mildly stressed. Kenma would feel guilty if he could feel anything right now. “Just – eat something, okay?”

Kuroo squeezes his shoulder, and turns away.

_Eat something._

Like it’s that easy.

After practice, an affair that had dragged out painfully, Kenma stops only to grab his bags from the changing rooms, pointedly ignoring flat chests and defined muscle. It leaves his mouth feeling better and a dizzy emptiness in his stomach that has nothing and everything to do with hunger. He ignores Kuroo’s watchful eyes as he crouches down to pull his bags over his shoulders, wincing as the straps dig into fat and bone.

He never changes with the team after training. There’s little point really, he tells himself, when there’s no showers at the school. He doesn’t like having to change into otherwise clean clothes while sweaty; either way, he walks home, and only takes the tube when absolutely necessary and the humid climate clinging to this city buildings is enough to build up a sweat alike to another practice session. It’s logical, not to change with the others when there’s so little point, and he is not suspicious for doing it. No one thinks anything of it. He has nothing to hide.

Kuroo knows.

Pulling the sides of the over-sized volleyball jacket tightly around his bound chest, he sets off out of the room without a word, already reaching for his phone to amuse himself on the way back.

“I hope your mum makes you something nice, Kenma. She’s a good cook.”

He keeps walking resolutely.

Arriving home, he is alone.

Kenma pulls down his mask to his neck and shrugs off his bags, carrying then by hand to his room. He drops them besides his bed, willing himself to carry on ignoring the persistent tremble wracking his hands as he attempts to unzip his jacket. His back is aching up a storm from both the binder and the combined weights of the bag, his stomach is humming and spiking with jolts of hunger and his god damn hands will not stay _still._

Finally, he gets some leverage on the zip and pulls it down, discarding his jacket and then his shorts, continuing to undress and forcing his eyes away from his ugly, distorted body, ignoring the hallowness he always feels when he is forced to take off his binder. The skin beneath is red. He’s fine. This is fine. He grabs his bath towel from the cupboard above his wardrobe and wraps himself in it as he journeys to the small bathroom. His arms and legs are beginning to feel shaky, exhausted and letting his emotions slip, but he pushes on to get the shower started. He just needs to get clean and then he can – deal with everything else.

_Just eat something._

The water hasn’t quite heated up yet when he steps under, but warm tears pool from his eyes.

It’s not that he doesn’t eat – because he does, and he is painfully aware of every occurrence of it. Kuroo bothers him otherwise, all big eyes and kid hands, and it’s so much energy to be bothered. Energy he doesn’t have to spare. Kuroo would pay too much attention to him, too much attention to his body, and so in turn would his team. Kenma doesn’t want people to look at his body. The mere thought of people seeing him, noticing him, is enough to dig up something fluttery and hysterical in his throat.

He is trapped between an insistent desire to whittle away until no one can ever see him again, and the fact that right now, doing just that would draw too much mind.

For now, he needs to maintain some semblance of fitness. He has to eat certain amounts – protein is the hardest, the most daunting, yet the most essential. This is all he needs to stay functional, to keep what little muscle he has, everything else is a surplus and a weight gain in fat he can’t afford. He can feel his binder dig into his waist whenever he eats, bearing down at the fatty tissue there while simultaneously pushing back what is wrong into his chest. If he eats too much, his figure will round out more. His chest will grow. His period will start.

He can eat the bare minimum. He can survive, but cannot blossom.

He will stay in his cocoon forever.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heavy eating disorder warning for this chapter

It’s easier at University.

He doesn’t have to pretend to be recovered anymore. It’s a thrilling, forbidden freedom where his shopping basket is light as a feather, where the walk back to his apartment from the store is accompanied by the gentle clinking of diet and caffeine pills inside their sealed bottles. It feels good to have little to nothing swinging from his shopping bags, little to nothing in his stomach, and he’s saving money - not much, he had bought a scale that set him back some not-so-small yen when he first arrived, but it was worth it.

These are positives. His empty cupboards and fridge shelves are positives. Floaty, free positives that leave him feeling dizzydizzydizzy when he stands, over exerts.

It feels wrong and far removed to the portrayals he’s using to seeing of people like him. People who have people worrying over their every mouthful, people who tell themselves they aren’t sick, just on a diet. That they just need to lose a little bit of weight, for a wedding or for a significant other. People who have innocently falling victim to an oh-so cliche portrayal of eating disorders and their tiny biting teeth; people who look in the mirror and see someone who isn’t them.

Kenma is used to looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger. But it’s a stranger he knows well. 

He knows he’s ill. He’s sick, and he’s getting sicker, and he doesn’t mind all that much. He likes it when he can’t find anything to fit, not necessarily as much as he hates the heart stopping panic that occurs after where he roots to find something that won’t make him look a pound fatter than he is - his thighs can’t touch, can’t even seem to via baggy material. It’s a reassurance of weight loss, it’s buying a shirt from the kids section and hanging it up in his wardrobe because he knows he’ll fit it. Soon.

All he needs is his eyes, his hands, to know his true body. The mirror has never been true, always showed him something irreversibly feminine that he refuses to accept. Even as he skips dinner (can it be called skipping when he never intended to eat it, anyway?) he can feel loose fat hanging from his legs, can see rolls when he sits, still has undeniable breasts - leftovers from Kuroo’s insistent _just one more bite_. 

_For the team_

_Eat something_

And Kuroo isn’t here. There’s no team to eat for. He never bothered to hand in his referral to the local well being centers, can ignore the emails from his therapists. When Kuroo calls, it’s gratifying to explain to him the meals he hasn’t had, the food he fantasizes about when his hollow stomach pinches at his insides late at night and refuses to let him sleep. Kuroo seems happy at his University, study a physiotherapy course that’s very scientific sounding in it’s first semester of the new year, from Kuroo’s complaints. But he also brings up new friends, occasionally has excited shouts in the background of his calls. It lodges something deeply unhappy in Kenma’s throat; something far worse than food, something he can’t throw up, no matter how hard he heaves and heaves when his roommate is out, no matter how much he bloodies his knuckles when they scrape along his teeth in his desperation to reach down his throat and pull the wrongness out. 

It only goes away after an hour long run, music blaring until the pain in his ankles, knees and hips is finally more than the inexplicable emotion physically manifesting itself in places it shouldn’t belong. He limps back to his apartment, greets his roommate Shigeru, ignores a polite question about where he’s been and sits on his bed, staring at the wall in his room.

This is fine.

###### 

Kenma mournfully eats an apple.

The day is cold, winter creeping into the days like a slowly spreading shadow, engulfing all the light and warmth as it advances forward into the next month. It’s mid November, but Kenma had been wearing gloves, scarfs and hats since October. It’s insufferable outside. He hates layering, hates having to look bigger, but he wears the full support binder under a thermal shirt, t-shirt and a grey and black patterned sweater Kuroo had bought him over the spring break, telling him he’d need it. Over that, a coat when he’s outside.

He feels ridiculous and massive, like he’s wearing a sumo wrestling costume, but anything less and he shivers so much people can’t ignore it. They ask him if he’s okay, check he’s wearing enough, offer him jackets for the lecture duration. He hates every second he’s not invisible, hates how they stare at his thighs and the empty air between them, how their hands never quite touch when they reach out to stop him - to borrow notes, ask him a question, offer him an overview of something he missed - but never make contact, like they’re scared he’ll break. (He’s terrified someone will make contact, one day, and feel the squeeze and give of the fat that layers over his bones in gelatinous deposits. He’s scared they’ll realise he’s fatter than he looks. He’s scared they’ll realise how disgusting he is.)

Attention gets worse when he shivers. When he looks sicker than usual, or tired, someone always asks if he’s ill today. The nice girl that sits with him in the History of Literature lectures always smiles at him like he’s at a funeral, doesn’t comment on why, though their lecture ends at lunchtime, Kenma never joins her to eat despite her offers, just buys a coffee and sits alone at the end of a crowded coffee table and tries to write down the lecture before he loses his thoughts completely to the hungry fog he can’t seem to shake anymore. She waves at him from her table, then whispers to her friends.

They looked concerned. Sometimes jealous.

He eats his apple because he can’t think straight, because he has another three hours before he can leave and he can’t still his hands and his thighs ache something terrible from yesterday. There’s a lightness in his bones that feels like he’ll float away any second, or maybe just pass out. He can’t afford that kind of attention, so he eats the stupid apple and doesn’t meet the eyes of anyone who looks his way. It feels like a failure, though he can only talk himself into half.

On his way home, hands shaking in his jacket pockets and thumbing at his phone which he desperately wants to take out but it’s just too freezing, he hears a short guy telling his friend, a girl, that cigarettes actually do suppress appetite because he hasn’t been hungry all day. She laughs and tells him that’s no excuse for smelling like a chimney. They bump shoulders companionably. Something scratches at Kenma’s throat.

He buys a pack on the way back. The stuttering and horrible embarrassment as he fumbles for his ID is worth anything that can take away the pain, the nausea, even just for a second.

###### 

“Kenma!”

Kenma can’t help but smile slightly at the warm greeting, “Hey, Kuro.”

The spaces between each phone call had started to grow, and the sound in the background of Kuroos’ deep voice seemed too, as well. There’s always a show, or the quiet chatter of others, or the not so quiet Bokuto who had, to both boys enthusiasm, ended up in the same University as Kuroo last year. They liked to rant about it being fate, divine intervention at work, but Kenma is just thankful no one else has to deal with rooming with either of them. It just wouldn’t be fair. 

Kenma’s side of the line is always quiet.

“How are you! When does your university break up, again? I’m heading home on the 22nd,”

“I break up on the 24th, I think.” Kuroo laughs cheerfully into the receiver, and Kenma clutches that sound tightly to his chest. 

“That’s too bad, but don’t mind, don’t mind!” Someone yells it back at Kuroo in his apartment, “Tell me when you book the train back. I’ll meet you at the station.”

“Okay,”

Quiet,

“I’ve missed you, Kenma.” His voice is soft, gentle. Kenma doesn’t know what to do with the heavy ball knotting in his stomach, can’t identify what emotions are wrestling away inside of him.

He brings his nails up to his throat, scratches the red skin there.

“I miss you too, Kuro.”

###### 

A week before winter breaks, he passes out.

It’s nothing dramatic, he had kind of seen it coming. On his walk home he had felt increasingly sick, a cigarette had done nothing to help, only making him more lightheaded with the nicotine worming through his veins. He wondered if his head would just disconnect, float away, and by the point he had reached his door he couldn’t actually get the key to fit in because his vision was so skewed he might have been jamming it in the door frame.

Shigeru opens the offending door for him, asks him if he’s okay, and Kenma thinks he said yes but Shigeru is still there when Kenma shakily staggers into his room, sits on his bed, and just - 

Passes out.

When he wakes up, Shigeru is muttering under his breath and on the phone to someone, running one hand through his faded hair like he was genuinely worried - or something. Kenma doesn’t think he’s ever even asked Shigeru how he is, or started a conversation first, but his head hurts too much to really concentrate on that too much. He tries to sit up, and the pain spikes immediately and he kind of - slumps back down into the covers, Shigeru suddenly hovering over him in a way reminiscent of a concerned Kuroo.

“What?” He ends up saying, kind of dumbly, hiking the sleeves of his sweater back over his fingers. It’s always cold in his room. His coat, he’s sure he was wearing it, appears to be absent. He becomes hyper aware of his position, laid out in a bed, double chin probably cushioning his chin and the fat of his thighs spreading out between his legs, filling that gap, his roommate can see it all; his nasty little secret. 

He tries to sit up again.

“Kenma - no, I - you passed out, I think. Just stay still a second.” But he doesn’t touch him, doesn’t try to stop him with anything physical and Kenma forces himself into a sitting position, feels his arms straining to push up his bulk. The limbs feel tired, worn, and he can’t decide whether to be concerned over that or everything else crowding noisily at the edges of his conscious. He tries to think back, sorting carefully through his clamoring thoughts to this morning; it had not been much different to usual. He had woken up with a headache, and his sinus’s had ached horribly, but he had changed and made it to his 10am seminar. His professor had smiled at him, reminded him of a deadline, let him know that if anybody (while looking solely at Kenma) needed an extension for any personal reasons, that they could talk to him in his office.

And Kenma had wondered if he had been slacking in his school work at lunch later on, and decided to stay later in the library to re-do his notes. Just in case. In the library, he took some caffeine pills and drank 2 bottles of water to stay awake in the over heated study space. Afterwards he walked home, as usual.

Then why did he pass out?

“Uh... Kenma...” Amber eyes shot up to watch Shigeru rub the back of his head, “Have you eaten today?”

He - he really didn’t know what to say that. Shigeru seemed to sense his hesitation, and quickly began to babble, “Because, uh, I made miso soup earlier and I have some leftover that you could, uh, have if you’re feeling better, maybe? I know you don’t have any - anything, uh, I heated it up for you, okay?”

Before he can protest, his roommate is out of the room and in the kitchen, unlocked phone left on Kenma’s bedside table. His background picture is the standard factory setting, a grey gradient, and Kenma stares at it blurrily. He’s so tired.

Time isn’t passing correctly, as evidenced by the seconds it seems to take for Shigeru to re-appear, bowl in hand. He deposits it with a pair of Kenma’s own chopsticks, taken from his draw, on the table his phone had laid moments before. The next victim of his unfocused gaze is the bowl of miso, green vegetables neatly protruding from the plentiful broth. It looks - appealing, but his stomach is empty past the point of growling, hunger only manifesting as a dull, constant pain he’s longed since grown used to.

“You’ll feel better if you get some liquids in you,” Shigeru advises him. Kenma wonders why he can’t just drink a glass of water. He heaves himself closer to the edge of the bed, sheets catching at his thighs, and he feels too big to be entirely real when his eyes catch on the gathering fat pooling out from every angle of his body. He wants to disappear; the thought isn’t new.

He picks up the bowl and the chopsticks, feeling the ceramic warm against his legs, and smiles at Shigeru like he can’t see the worry on his face.

“Thank you. I feel better already.”

Later, when Shigeru is asleep, he throws up something watery and cold. It’s a mockery of Shigeru’s worry, tinged in slight strands of blood from a scratched throat, and Kenma cries into the porcelain bowl.

###### 

He hates public transport.

Anxiously, he thumbs at his small suitcase, haphazardly stuffed with his winter reading and clothes he could never really get the hang of folding small enough. Every few seconds, he glances down at the case to ensure its still zipped closed, his hands in his pockets twitching as he tries to recount everything he’s packed - his PSP charger is in the front pocket, his laptop piled at the top, securely strapped down, and his calorie book slipped down the side next to his socks and boxers and binders. 

Kenma breathes deeply, but anxiety still thrills hysterically in his chest.

It’s not that he doesn’t want to see Kuroo - he does, desperately - but he knows he’s been bad, knows he’s been doing exactly what Kuroo had been trying to stop him doing for years, what his therapists and parents and the whole of fucking Nekoma had been holding him back from. The moment he was out of their sight, their influence, he’d dived right back in to the start-line like their carefully crafted reassurances and support meant nothing to him. But they did mean something to him, and he knows they do, knows it well, but sometimes thoughts like that just can’t surface beyond the cold, waxy numbness that drives him through each day.

And he liked relapsing. He likes being in control, and the only thing he can feel is regret and guilt about is Kuroo finding out all the lies he’s been spinning.

Kenma is pathetic, and selfish, and it’s better for everyone if he really did just starve to death.

He presses his eyes into the sleeve of his jacket, refusing to cry publicly on a train. He catches a ladies eyes as he does so, and blushes furiously, keeping his face hidden behind his hair and drawing out his phone to thumb comfortably at the screen. Blinking quickly, he re-reads the text from Kuroo announcing his arrival at the station. It’s dated five minutes prior, and there’s a sickening sinking feeling in his stomach mingling unpleasantly with the butterflies fluttering there. He’s excited. Nervous.

The train slows.

As the doors rattle open, people push past him, knocking into his arms in ways he just knows is going to leave angry, blackening bruises later. Holding his phone in one hand, his case towing behind him in the other, he disembarks, taking care not to get his bags caught up in the gap between the platform. Rightened, he glances around, trepidation building up slowly in his throat as he moves along with the string of people, searching for a empty spot to escape the flow or a familiar mane of hair. The choking crowd is starting to get too much just as a hand closes around his elbow, fingers overlapping in an audible scrape.

The grasp on his arm pulls him to the side, between two announcement pillars, and Kenma barely gets a chance to see Kuroo’s face before he’s being squished against that oh-so-familiar chest, strong arms looping him in tightly. Tears build up in his eyes before he can stop them, an overbearing relief bursting open deep in his chest, and he clings back, phone still in one hand as he digs his hands into Kuroo’s back, pressing hard against him.

For the first time in months, he feels warm.

###### 

They travel back to Kuroo’s place.

His place is close by from the station Kenma chose, on the outskirts of the city, but still a five minute tube ride there. Kuroo doesn’t let go of Kenma for a second, big hands capturing his elbow and his hands and his lower back at intervals- strong, supportive. He pays for Kenma’s subway fare, doesn’t even let him reach for his bag, and tows Kenma’s case for him, the handles set to the highest setting to accommodate his height. The crowds are a convenient excuse not to converse.

In the cramped compartment, Kenma is pushed firmly into a end chair. He wants to protest, give his seat up for the woman besides him, but she jerkily looks away when he hesitates and Kuroo nods to her. He’d secretly glad to be able to sit - the whole way here he had stood, too nervous to leave his bag out of his sight and the only available seats being window side. As a consequence, every step feels like grinding down his bones to the spongy marrow inside, and a soft brand of exhaustion lights in his joints. 

It still feels kind of pathetic, though. Sitting when there are others who need it more. But one look at his friend’s face tells him he’s not going anywhere, the grip on his shoulder light but demanding. They don’t talk, and Kenma finally gives in to the urge to reach for his phone - it’s low battery, but he has a few games that aren’t overly demanding for his device. He doesn’t miss the smallest of smiles in the stony silence when they leave the subway, Kuroo firmly looping an arm around him to keep him close in the crowds, and then keeps it there just to keep him close down sparser and sparser streets.

There’s an intense buzzing in Kenma’s head telling him he shouldn’t have come back, should have made up excuses about staying in dorms for the winter break because he was behind on work, or just never replying to Kuroo in the first place. He’s been selfish, needy, keeping him in his life like this, making him worry over nothing. If he disappeared, broke it all off, Kuroo could forget about him, and Kenma wouldn't have to feel so guilty every time that voice purred over the phone to him, asking him if he’s eaten. And Kuroo wouldn’t have to wonder if Kenma has gone and had a heart attack yet because he couldn’t keep down one measly apple. 

Kenma steers his character, a over animated blob of red slime, off a cliff side in a bid for game currency as they arrive at the entrance of Kuroo’s home. It’s so horribly nostalgic than Kenma can’t look at it directly, keeps his gaze locked on the game over screen and his reasonably low score as they walk up to the entrance, Kuroo letting him go to unlock the door. They take off their coats coats together, and Kenma doesn’t have to be a genius to figure out Kuroo is probably staring at him, free from the oversized parka.He knows there’s going to consequences, knows they’re not going to be good, and he can hardly swallow as he enters the kitchen, Kuroo’s mum already calling out a greeting.

“Kozume-kun! It’s so good to see you again!” There’s the slightest hitch when she turns round, but her smile doesn’t falter in the slightest as she scans Kenma’s fidgeting form. “Was the train ride pleasant?”

“It was okay, thank you Kuroo-san,” She smiles softly at the two of them, sharp eyes seeking something in their faces before turning back to the pot on the stove.

“Will you be staying for dinner, Kozume-kun?”

The outline of the mobile in his grasp digs in heavily to the soft flesh of his hands. She noticed. Of course she noticed. He knows he’s lost too much weight to keep it subtle anymore - objectively. Despite everything, it’s not enough. He can always afford to lose more. 

“I don’t think so, Kuroo-san.” He can’t see her expression, but Kuroo shifts uneasily next to him, minutely closer than earlier. Another push to up his anxiety.

“You’re never any trouble, Kozume-kun. I’ll make more just in case,” She reaches for a wooden spoon next to her, “Now why don’t you to go up to Tetsu’s room? I know you’re both dying to get out of here,” 

“Nice seeing you too, mum!” Kuroo calls with a laugh Kenma knows isn’t real, and it makes him feel shaky that he caused this. There’s a rift between them, bigger than the space between their clasped hands, a touch Kenma hadn’t even noticed till Kuroo tugged him into his room by their joined limbs. 

His home is familiar, the skin on his hand is familiar, and the tears on his cheeks as Kuroo barely hesitates to drag him to his bed and pull him into his arms is horrifying, sickeningly familiar, too. Kuroo is shaking a little, and Kenma presses his nose firmly into the space between his shoulder and his neck, closing his eyes as tight as possible as salt lingers in his mouth. They're impossibly quiet together as Kenma slowly minimizes the distance in his detachment, anchors himself back down into the body he hates so much, just to feel the warmth of his partner who he does love. So, so much.

Kuroos hands drift under his jacket, brushing across the exaggerated nothingness above his hip, worrying at the dips of his ribs, shakily trying to smooth over the flesh there as if he could take away the jagged edges of all Kenma’s obsessive behavior. It doesn’t work, and he pulls Kenma to him tighter, arms looping around and defiantly resisting to note the notches of spine that press back.

Kenma feels like he should say something. Like there is a rift in their usual non verbal cues, their soundless conversations that comforted him through out their school years, and that he must cross this rift with words. But they’re stuck in his throat, sticky and coppery, and there’s still a part of him telling him that it’s presumptuous, self indulgent to believe he’s lost enough weight to cause this much a reaction. That Kuroo is upset about something else. That Kenma doesn’t mean _that_ much to him, hasn’t lost _that_ much weight.

Isn’t sick enough.

“Kenma,” 

And he’s too late. Like always. 

“Kenma, why didn’t you say something?” Kuroo pulls away slightly, keeping Kenma on his lap but maneuvering their contact to see his face “We... we talked so many times. All those times on the phone...” He’s hurt, wounded and Kenma feels like his ribs are going to crack open. He’s still crying silently, doesn’t know what to say. He holds those golden eyes instead behind a foggy screen of salt water, focuses on the warm light hitting against dark specs and clings as tight as he can, fingers crooked as he burrows them tighter to Kuroos warmth.

“Fuck,” Whispers Kuroo, leaning his forehead on Kenmas, breaking eye contact to close his eyes to Kenmas prying, “Fuck, Kenma. You’re so tiny... I...” his eyelids scrunch up, his skin pulling tight, “I should’ve come to see you before it got like this.”

“Kuro,” The self blame is so evident in the former captains words that Kenma can’t stand the hollowness echoing in his limbs, wouldn’t want to even try to stand it if it meant Kuroo blamed himself for something that was evidently out of his control. 

“It’s not your fault, I... I know I’m... I - uh. I did this,” There’s a block in his head that prevents him from saying what he wants to. It’s composed of pulsing, negative emotions that he tries to twist away from like a picky cat, whose influence he doesn’t want drilling into his mind, surrounding him with a weighted fogginess. Guilt. Self disgust. A snarling impression of everything twisted, one that brings forth vivid, visceral moments of pale, bulging thighs and bundled rolls of fat collected at his abdomen. 

“I was supposed to be better, ” And he frowns, because he was. Supposed to be better. And that never really happened. “You didn’t know.” His voice cracks on the last word. He’s so tired of being tired. Sick of being sick. Exhausted from strangling the stems of flowers, propagating weeds in the hopes they’ll squash his hunger, steal his food and tired from endlessly searching out the tiniest of puds, plucking juvenile petals before they form. 

It’s all this effort, this labor to stop himself becoming something he was never supposed to be. And in killing it, the wrongness, he kills himself with it. He loses pieces of himself he can never recover, not with any hours of therapy or countless well balanced, portioned meals. There are empty places inside him, cavities that will never develop because he won’t let them, and they fill him with a trilling, high pitch horror. Frantic anxiousness.

He doesn’t want to die. And he only knows that here, now, in Kuroo’s lap with his lips against his forehead, fitted perfectly like his skull dipped just there to allow it. To make space in his body for Kuroo. He doesn’t want to die and he’s scared when he can’t get out of his bed, when he passes out, when he can’t remember yesterday and when his hair falls out in his hands. When everything aches, when his skin dries up and breaks out and grows a soft, peachy fuzz as if something so delicate and brittle could make up for the years of under eating that preceded it. He’s so, so scared of not existing anymore, of not knowing what else there is to him except living, dragging by on the edges of the unknown.

He doesn’t want to die, but he knows that he’s killing himself. It’s slow, to try and fool himself, stave off the panic that keeps his heart beating frighteningly fast when he lays in bed at night and feels so sickeningly empty he’s not sure there’s anything left inside of him to metabolize. It’s slow. It’s happening. 

He has been busy dying, starving to the void.

“I-I don’t know what to do... Kuro,” The words are slurred coming from his trembling lips, utterly unsure and filled with a meaning he doesn’t completely intend. The other shifts again, underneath him, pulls his thighs till they’re either side of his waist, palms easily encompassing every inch of cold, covered skin. They slot together easily, the ache in his bones easing as he lets himself crumple against the steady, reliable chest of the only person that’s ever really mattered to him. The person that didn’t care about the words whispered between cupped hands about Kenma’s cut hair and messy knees, that stood by his side as the third years laughed about having a girl on the boys volleyball team, the person who knew all his safe foods off by heart and had felt the scars in his arms from IVs and blunt nails. Had seen the very worst parts of him.

He loves Kuroo so much it’s an ache in his heart to imagine the absence of it. And that’s why, when Kuroo murmurs “We’ll figure this out,” quietly in his ear, wrapped around Kenma like he can protect him from everything bad in this world including Kenma himself, he isn’t sure if it’s true, but he’ll believe.

For Kuroo. 

For the child he used to be, innocent and naive and frightened to become someone he should never be, a kid who didn’t understand hunger pains and failing organs and bending bones, but knew they had to do something. For the fucking 12 year old he still feels like inside, the one who’s terrified of blooming, who flinches at hair touches and daisy dresses, who didn’t deserve a single fucking second of the hell Kenma has put him through since a blinking cursor stumbled across that nauseating, floral web page all those years ago.

For them, Kenma will burn this cocoon to the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i hate this trope in fics about magical recovery so i want to emphasis that eating disorders stay with you for most of your life, active or not, and this fic is written in kenma's headspace which will constantly change. recovery is up and down and so is the intensity of eating disordered habits+thoughts. 
> 
> I've already started a smaller fic to accompany this of snapshots in Kenma's recovery+ transition stuff. It didn't fit in with this fic so I'll be posting it separately. Also watch this space for a an OT4 fic in the near future (may or may not involve kenma and akkashi *cough*)
> 
> this is unbetaed, feel free to point out typos, or just drop any old comment letting me know if you enjoyed , thank you so much for reading my trashfics and i'll see you on my next fic... hopefully ^_^
> 
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> [tumblr](http://killuay.tumblr.com)


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